Congress’ ”biggest scam of the century” isn’t actually a scam

There was an uproar in the Rajya Sabha assembly session earlier today. The Congress ‘exposed’ the ‘biggest scam of the century’ by claiming that two types of Rs 500 notes were being printed, with senior leader Kapil Sibal demonstrating copies of the two variants.

He said, “I have found two kinds of Rs 500 and Rs 2000 notes whose dimensions and design differ. How is it possible that two different kinds notes are printed.”

Raising the issue through a point of order, Sibal said different sizes of the new high denomination currency was being printed — “one for the ruling party (members) and one for the others”.

JD(U)’s Sharad Yadav, who has been reportedly uneasy since his party aligned with the BJP to form a government in Bihar, sided with the opposition and showed enlarged copies of differently sized 500 rupee notes.

To give proper reasoning and explain its rationality Congress allegedly said that RBI was working at the behest of the ruling party and had printed out one set of the currency exclusively for them which was slightly different from the other notes.

Naturally, this issue took social media by storm and also the Rajya Sabha today had to be adjourned four times in the first hour of proceedings in the upper house.

Turns out, that the ‘biggest’ scam is actually not a scam because RBI had issued a notice regarding the matter in December 2016 which said that the bank was going to print the second type of note which didn’t have any inset letter i.e the watermark and will bear the signature of Dr Urjit R. Patel, the governor of RBI. It was also mentioned that this will continue to be a legal tender.

The RBI must have taken this step in order to cope with heavy printing volumes after demonetization.

People took to twitter to slam Congress for creating a ruckus for a made-up scam that they themselves came up with. One of the tweets said, “Whenever Congress receives a major political blow, it immediately announces a press conference to expose something huge. Amazing creativity!”